Across Australia and beyond, early childhood education (ECE) services play a significant role in the everyday lives of infants, toddlers and their families. For some decades, the enrolment of infants and toddlers has increased to the extent that, in today’s Australian society, around 40% of birth to 24-month-olds and nearly 60% of two-year-olds spend at least part of their week in an early childhood service. More still balance ECE service attendance with informal care arrangements with family members and friends. With these figures echoed across many countries worldwide, the widespread uptake of infant and toddler early childhood programs has meant that this generation of infants and toddlers and their families are experiencing a markedly different start to life than previous generations. It is now the norm for infant–toddler care to be spread across multiple contexts both within and outside of the walls of the family home, and for the responsibility for early learning to be shared between family and non-familial adults.

Describe how children think and behave differently in groups; explain the roles of collaboration, self-identity, and categorisation in creating and sustaining groups; understand how group differences can be reduced via intergroup contact, cooperation, and empathy.

Civil wars are complex events that alter the group trajectories and lives of everyone directly and indirectly involved. Studying these devastating crises effectively requires understanding and using multiple approaches. This book explores various theoretical explanations for the onset of civil wars, highlighting patterns in conflict dynamics over time and in different regions. For instance, the “greed” perspective suggests that rebels are driven by profit, treating rebellion as an economic opportunity. Another perspective centers on grievances, where rebel leaders mobilize due to collective political, economic, social, cultural, or identity-related grievances. Often these grievances stem from the government exclusion of minorities, unequal opportunities, and restrictions on collective group rights, particularly in states with weak institutions. A further perspective, the capacity-and-opportunity model, focuses on how material resources play a vital role in financing violence through a materialistic lens. Across all themes, this text serves as a means for providing a comprehensive analysis of civil wars, covering their onset, duration, destructiveness, outcome, and recurrence.

In this chapter, we present a few selected subjects that are important in applications as well but are not usually included in a standard linear algebra course. These subjects may serve as supplemental or extracurricular materials. The first subject is the Schur decomposition theorem, the second is about the classification of skew-symmetric bilinear forms, the third is the Perron–Frobenius theorem for positive matrices, and the fourth concerns the Markov or stochastic matrices.

The loss of human life and physical injuries through violence are an inherent consequence of armed conflict, including civil wars. Deliberate atrocities – such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, politicide and “ethnic cleansing” – have been a conspicuous feature of many wars. Civil wars – whether correctly or incorrectly from an empirical perspective – have often been regarded as particularly vicious, transgressing all norms of decency in the frequency and type of atrocities. This chapter explores several key questions that have arisen in the conflict analysis field in relation to atrocities in civil war – and war generally. Are atrocities specifically associated with certain “types” of civil war, such as separatist, ideological, intercommunal, or resource conflict? Are there patterns in terms of which types of actors – state or non-state rebel groups – are more likely to perpetrate atrocities? What motivates individuals and groups to perpetrate atrocities, and what “role,” if any, do such atrocities play in armed conflict? Do atrocities play a strategic role, or are they better understood as a manifestation of individual and group sadism, revenge, and hate or fear, spread in the contemporary era by social media? Are all combatants capable of perpetuating atrocities in the “right” circumstances? The chapter concludes with a discussion of the international norms that have emerged over the last century – which prohibit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide – and the calls for accountability and justice after mass atrocities that have arguably made a significant although limited impact on conduct in war. As a part of this, “transitional justice” has emerged as an important topic, designed to address the societal impact and legacy of atrocities.

A rich and important area for the applications of linear algebra is machine learning. In machine learning, one aims to achieve optimized or learned understanding of various kinds of real-world phenomena from data collected or observed, without real comprehension of the functioning mechanisms of such phenomena. These functioning mechanisms are often impossible or unpractical to grasp anyway. In this chapter, we present several introductory and fundamental problems in supervised machine learning including linear regression, data classification, and logistic regression and the mathematical and computational methods associated.

In East Asia, the liberal Westernizing tendencies of the 1920s were replaced in the 1930s by authoritarian single-party rule in China and ultranationalistic militarism in Japan. Japan was wracked by a series of assassinations and attempted coups, which left the miliary in control. On the pretext of a staged explosion on the tracks of the Japanese-run South Manchurian Railroad (in China) in 1931, the Japanese army seized control over much of Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo. While Chiang Kai-shek struggled to put the Republic of China on a secure foundation, the rising communist leader Mao Zedong began experimenting with rural peasant revolution. After Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own generals and compelled to agree to a United Front with the Communists against Japan, a minor incident in July 1937 triggered the start of full-scale war with Japan. Japan’s inability to decisively defeat Nationalist China, then, led Japan to expand the war, eventually attacking Pearl Harbor and bringing the Allies into the war on China’s side.